


Morning Breaks Upon The Tomb

by treefrogie84



Series: Coldest Hits That Weren't [5]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Charlie Bradbury Lives, Eileen Leahy Lives, background Sam Winchester/ Eileen Leahy, not Joss'd yet, post 14.20
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-18
Updated: 2019-08-18
Packaged: 2020-09-07 00:23:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20300395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/treefrogie84/pseuds/treefrogie84
Summary: Graveyards around the world break open, spilling their inhabitants into the living streets. Monsters resurrect themselves, all the things that go bump in the night pick up their swords, claws and venom and bump back.





	Morning Breaks Upon The Tomb

**Author's Note:**

> This is why me watching s10 during the writing period for CH is a bad plan. I already had a fic, it was mostly (entirely?) done. And then I got freshly pissed off about Charlie.

Blinking heavily in the sudden dimness of the pub, Charlie glances around while she brushes the rain off her jacket before wandering towards the bar and then, drink in hand, towards the quiet table under the lamp.

Eileen waves half heartedly, tapping the edge of her glass.

Nodding and throwing a thumbs up, Charlie doubles back to grab a beer for Eileen, dancing around the crowd gathered around the only TV in the place.

“Everything okay?” Eileen asks, frowning.

Charlie shrugs, setting their drinks on the table and fumbling through her rudimentary ASL. “Got caught up in some bullshit. Starting to think it might be time to go home.”

“What’s going on?”

Charlie shakes her head, taking a long drink of her cider. “Nothing specific, just…” She pulls her phone out of her pocket and taps rapidly to get back to the article she’d been reading.

“‘Vandals unknown in nation-wide cemetery destruction’,” Eileen reads before scanning the rest of the article. “You think this is a hunt?”

“I think it probably has a lot to do with our own trouble here,” Charlie admits. “And… I’m homesick. Never thought that was my thing, but--”

“But you want to go home,” Eileen finishes. “Is that safe? I don’t want to tangle with the jerkfaces of Letters again.”

“Have you met me?” Charlie grins across the table, hoping Eileen can’t quite read her despair.

* * *

The front door thuds closed, echoing down the tunnel. “How’d it go?” Dean calls up from the war room, barely listening for a response as he marks another crop of mess on the map. The table is littered with small stickers-- he’ll worry about prying them off the glass later, when they’re not dealing with Chuck’s temper tantrum-- in scaley patches, all over the world. “Were you on the ghosts or the--”

“Dean?”

“Celeste? Not that I’m not glad you’re here and all, but I thought you were roadtripping with--” Dean glances up. “Cas! Get in here!” Grabbing the shot gun from under the table, he jumps under the iron balcony and lets a salt round fly up through the grate.

“What the _gorram _fudge, dude?” Celeste demands before she starts down the stairs, completely unfazed by the salt. “You haven’t seen me in four frackin’ years so you _shoot _me?”

Dean blasts them again, watches the salt bounce off. Physical beings then, not ghosts. He tosses the shot gun aside, pulling a knife from his belt and holding it ready as he edges out from under the stairs.

“Dean!” Cas careens into the room, angel blade already held at the ready. He launches himself at the stairs, missing Celeste but tackling the… thing that followed her in. It looks like Eileen, but there’s no way. She’s dead, she’s been dead for years. It’s gotta be a shifter or something.

Celeste slugs Cas across the face, and the shifter nearly throws him off in Cas’s shock, but he holds on.

“Celeste, get away from it.” Dean grabs her and pushes her behind him, where he can protect her. She’ll yell at him later, but she’ll be safe then so… “Let us take care of it.”

“No! That’s…”

“Stop!” The shifter yells hoarsely. “Test me.” Her hands move jerkily under Cas’s grip, familiar motions Dean hasn’t seen in years. “Eileen, not dead.”

Looking up, he meets Cas’s eyes. “Cas?”

Cas nods silently, eyes dark. “Go.”

Dean doesn’t bother with salt, but he runs them both through all the rest of the tests-- holy water, silver, everything he’s ever had to deal with-- and they come up clean. Somehow, they come up clean. Human, or close enough. “How?” he asks, half broken. “Did you somehow bring her over from a different universe too?” He fumbles the ASL-- he was never any good, and the last couple of years have driven most of it from his memory-- but he thinks he manages to get a few signs across.

Celeste opens her mouth to respond, but gets cut off by another clatter at the entrance. The hunting party, a team of four this time, invades the war room, the leader starting her report before she’s even hit the stairs.

Dean shakes his head to clear it. “Cas, get Eileen someplace out of the way and call Sam. Celeste, do whatever. I gotta take care of this.” Turning back to team, he pushes them to the back of his mind and focuses on locating the completed hunt on Sam’s too complicated system.

* * *

“Gotta say, Cas, this is not the welcome home I was expecting.”

Cas twists around to look at her, tilting his head and looking pensive. “You left the Bunker again a week ago, and checked in yesterday.”

“Why the bad place do you keep calling me Celeste?” Charlie demands. “You’ve never called me that. Even when I was separated into good and evil--”

“How do you--” Cas stares at her for a long moment, mouth falling open. “Sam and Dean, they burned your body… how…”

Charlie grins at him brightly, slinging an arm around his shoulders. “Surprise?”

Cas grins back, eyes lighting up as he rapidly signs something to Eileen who nods.

“Is Sam here?” Eileen asks. “Is he okay?”

“Not right now, but I believe he should be home tonight.” Cas’s smile drops. “Unless he finds another hunt, of course. I’ll call him as soon as we get you settled.”

“Cas, what’s up with Sam?”

He sighs. “It’s been a long couple of years. And an even longer couple of months.”

“So he’s not okay,” Eileen says flatly, hands moving slower. “We kept up with some of the news, but--”

“Amara and the Men of Letters and Michael and now Chuck… yeah.” Cas shrugs. “I can tell you the basics if you’d like, or you can wait until Sam and Dean are free.” He smiles wryly. “I can understand why you’d like to only hear it once, or tell your own stories once.”

Charlie meets Eileen’s eyes and shrugs. “Our side isn’t that interesting. I can’t believe you guys actually thought I was _dead_. Eileen, yeah, I engineered the everloving out of that spell, but me? C’mon.”

Cas nods and heads deeper into the Bunker, towards where Charlie remembers Dean’s room as being. “You’ve both been here before, so you remember where everything is? There might be other hunters come in tonight-- they don’t trust the unknown, or anything that smacks of Heaven or Hell, so try to avoid them as much as possible.”

“Understood.” Charlie tosses off a salute before Cas heads back to the common areas. “You still think this was a good idea?”

Eileen shrugs. “Maybe we should have come back earlier-- We knew the old men weren’t a problem anymore on this side of things.”

“It was a nice vacation while it lasted.” Charlie snorts and twists open the knob to Dean’s room. “Sounds like we’ve got some time to ki-- Oh, my.”

Dean’s room is a mess-- dirty clothes dropped wherever they landed, the weapons above his bed gone and the pegs hanging empty, and the box Charlie knew he kept his porn in knocked to its side, half-spilled across the floor. Books and garbage and… “Oh, Dean.” Turning, she looks back at Eileen. “Want to try Sam’s room? Or just clear off the couch?”

Eileen’s face goes beet red and she shakes her head. “In here’s fine. Somehow, it’ll be less awkward.”

Charlie nods, glancing at the couch. “Here it is then.”

It takes them a few minutes to clear it off, mostly by shifting the clothes to the floor and the papers to the desk, and then they curl up, waiting, like they’ve spent so many evenings over the last two years.

* * *

“Hey Cas, what’s up?”

“We need you back at the Bunker, Sam.”

“I was going to, really, but I found another case and--”

“And nothing,” Cas cuts him off, uncharacteristically sharp. “You wanted other hunters to help with cases, so trust them to do their jobs.”

“What’s going on, Cas?”

“A surprise visitor.” Cas heaves a sigh and, faintly, Sam can hear a train in the distance, probably picking up grain from the silos in town. “Charlie. And Eileen.”

“You know she hates it when we call her-- Wait, what?” Sam cuts himself off, hauling hard on the wheel to U-Turn in the middle of the two lane road. “What?”

“They arrived this evening. I assumed you would want to know so you could welcome them home.”

“How?” Glancing around, Sam presses harder on the gas, edging the Impala’s speed ever closer to ninety as he speeds back towards central Kansas. “I’ll be there in a few hours.” He falls silent, but doesn’t hang up the phone. “Cas? How sure are you?”

“As sure as we can be without touching their souls,” Cas says quietly. “Given how dangerous that is, I haven’t--”

“No, yeah, that’s fine. I get it.” He forces out a laugh. “Don’t want to blow up the Bunker or anything.” He pauses for a moment before shaking his head and ending the call.

* * *

Dean takes his time getting the other hunters debriefed and everything else. Normally, he speeds through this part, but he… doesn’t know what’s waiting for him. He’s said his goodbyes to Charlie and Eileen both, laid them to rest, accepted their never-ending rotation in his nightmares and here they are. Alive. Remarkably whole for two women butchered before they were burned.

Eventually, he runs out of make work and avoidance. Grabbing a few bowls of… whatever is on the stove, he slowly makes his way down the hallways, juggling bowls, beer, and his laptop. The door to his room is ajar, which, awesome, he’s been too much of a disaster to clean his room, having Charlie and Eileen in there is going to be _great_.

Charlie is dozing at one end of the loveseat, tablet screen dark. Eileen looks up from her book at the other end when the door opens, a grin spreading across her face.

“Hello, Dean.”

He manages to not drop anything as he waves slightly, leaving his laptop on his desk and passing around the bowls. “So why are you here? Now?”

Eileen frowns, glancing past him to the door. “It was time. The problems with the graveyards--”

“Yeah,” Dean cuts her off. “But you didn’t come back earlier. You didn’t even tell us you were _alive_. Either of you. We--” his voice breaks and he stops. Afraid to unload all his grief and anger and hurt on them, because they can always leave again.

They’ve left before, what’s another time?

“Dean, what’s going on?”

He huffs, staring down at his bowl of unidentifiable slop until he can control his face. “Nothing. Just tired.” It’s not even a lie, which helps sell it.

Eileen’s brow furrows, but she doesn’t press, lightly kicking Charlie on the other side of the couch. “I know you’re awake, faker.”

“What?” Charlie ostentatiously yawns and stretches, picking up her bowl. “I was not.”

“Sure.” Dean rolls his eyes, setting down his bowl and moving restlessly to his bed, slowly starting the process of clearing it off, tossing dirty clothes towards the corner, files to his desk. “So, wanna tell me what the hell you’ve been doing for the last few years?”

“Mostly? Keeping under the evil Empire’s radar and taking care of a few tiny hunts in Scotland.”

“Awesome.” Dean bites his cheek. “And you-- couldn’t call? Let us know?”

“What do you want me to do, Dean? Apologize?” Charlie demands. “Fine. I’m sorry I avoided getting dead and then saved Eileen from the same fate.”

Dean sags back, rubbing a hand across his face. “No, you’re right. I--” Swallowing, he looks over their heads. “Scotland, huh? Must have been cool.”

“Got kinda boring after a while, but there’s more than enough ghosts and fae to keep hunters busy the past couple of years.”

“Would have figured the dickbags would have been all over that.”

“Yeah, turns out the Brexit vote did all sorts of damage to all sorts of things, not just the unification of Great Britain.” Charlie snorts. “Not that they were all that concerned about their northern neighbors anyway.”

“Eileen,” Sam breathes from the doorway. The overgrown moose sweeps in, pulling Eileen to her feet and into a hug. She wraps her arms around him, burying her face into his chest, ignoring the rest of the world.

Cas follows him in, slower, stepping around Sam and shooting Dean a glare before pulling Charlie into a hug of her own.

Dean frowns where he is, alone, trying not to be awkward watching them. Stepping around the others, he silently gathers the bowls and empty beer bottles and slips back out of the room, heading towards the kitchen.

Joy comes in the morning. Or late evening. Either way, it comes far away from him. Taking a deep breath, he stares, dry-eyed, at the sink of full of dirty dishes before rolling up his sleeves and getting to work. Charlie and Eileen are alive, that’s what matters. Finally, a win.

Cas appears eventually, pulling Dean away from the sink and into a hug.


End file.
